Tony Marcus has multiple personalities — of the musical kind. As the guitarist/vocalist/songwriter himself puts it, “Being able to go from one musical setting to another, that’s a true gift.”

His current CD releases include “Vanishing Point,” an album of his original songs, and “Steel Swingin’,” which teams him with pedal steel guitarist Bobby Black and fiddler Paul Anastasio.

Marcus also teams with his wife, Patrice Haan, in the jazz-pop duo Leftover Dreams. Marcus also plays in western swing bands The Lost Weekend and Honky Tonk Dreamers.

And he joins Cheap Suit Serenaders for their annual January reunion at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage. Of this band, Marcus quipped, “I’m the new guy. I’ve only been doing it for 31 years.”

The San Francisco native, now based in Oakland, will celebrate his 60th birthday by assembling many of his musical friends at the Freight on Saturday night. Members of Cheap Suit Serenaders will be on hand.

There will be a reunion of another of his former bands, Cats & Jammers. Leftover Dreams will perform, with Jeff Sanford on reeds. Steel Swingin’ compatriots Black and Anastasio will participate in this very special evening as well.

At 16, Marcus began with folk music, learning to play string instruments. “I was not a very sociable youth, and playing music was a good way to interact with other people … without actually having to talk with them.”

He started on banjo, moved on to guitar and violin.

“I eventually got a saxophone, which I have not come close to mastering. For me, there’s no such a thing as truly mastering an instrument anyway. But I’ve gotten to where I’m pretty comfortable on a number of them.”

In college, Marcus studied visual arts, pondering painting.

“Art tends to be a solitary profession. It wouldn’t really have been a healthy thing for me to do.”

He committed to music. Gradually, his focus veered toward jazz and swing. “I was always attracted to those sounds since I first heard them. I heard Fats Waller and just thought ‘Oh, if I could only do something like that. That would be heaven.’

“Being the age I am, when I was in my later teenage years, that was the time of more free-form radio. So, if you listened to the FM stations in those days, DJs would throw together all sorts of stuff, including some stuff like Fats Waller or Louis Armstrong, in the midst of Cream and all that other stuff that was going on in the late ’60s.”

Fascinated by vintage sounds, Marcus enjoyed his time with Cheap Suit Serenaders.

“I knew a couple of the band members. I’d been working in a guitar store in Berkeley. In the recording of one of their albums, the band’s then guitar player made himself unwelcome. So they tossed him out of the band and needed to replace him with somebody. I was there, willing and, more or less, able.”

In the ’90s, R. Crumb connected with the band for a couple of European tours.

“He’s obviously an interesting guy,” Marcus said. “I’ve always been a fan of his artwork. It may be sick and twisted, but it’s very honest. He gets his weirdness out in his art. In terms of interacting with him personally, it was pretty normal, pretty easy.”

For 16 years, Marcus played in the Bay Area hot swing trio Cats & Jammers. “Lots of times, we’d get teenagers at the shows and they’d say, ‘We’ve never heard anything like this, but I really want to hear more of this stuff.’

“In the late ’90s, there was the alleged swing revival, which didn’t touch us at all, because what was being emphasized was the jump blues sort of sound from the late ’40s. They were just calling it swing music. That jump blues has an integrity of its own, but it was pretty amusing, in the midst of all that, to have 11-year-old kids come up and say, ‘This isn’t swing music!'”

It’s more romantic music that fuels Leftover Dreams. The duo particularly embraces the notion of introducing audiences to more obscure songs.

“I don’t really need to hear someone performing chestnuts, singing ‘Sentimental Journey,'” Marcus said. “‘I’d rather hear — or play or sing — stuff that people might not be familiar with, but which has as much musical value as the things that everybody knows.”

With a collection of 4,000 vinyl albums, plus CDs, they’re never at a loss for material. Marcus and his wife of 13 years enjoy sharing their musical experience.

“She grew up in a family that sang harmony all the time. Her mother sang for the troops in World War II. So it was far more in her blood than in mine. I was not from a musical family. My father played the radio. My mother was totally tone-deaf and proud of it.

“Patrice also plays Celtic harp and writes original material that’s not much like the original material I write at all. So the older jazz sort of styles are where we really intersect in our musical tastes.”

Marcus’ own eclectic tastes are reflected in “Vanishing Point,” which features a dozen of his own songs. “I have done original tunes as parts of albums of standards, trying to have them blend in. But this was a different thing to try, so it was scary. I figured I’d better get it done now, because I’m not getting any younger,” he said, laughing.